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The Story of Textiles 



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The Exhibition 

This handbook was pubHshed by the 
Newark Museum Association during the 
Exhibition of New Jersey Textiles held in 
the Public Library Building Feb. 1 to 
March 18, 1916, for the use of students 
and teachers. 

The exhibition consisted of exhibits of 
clothmaking, hatmaking, knitting, em- 
broidery and lace, rugmaking; modern arts 
and crafts and the handwork of the schools; 
an historic exhibit of old New Jersey-made 
textiles and the Homelands Exhibit, articles 
contributed by school children of foreign 
parentage. Also 66 firms contributed com- 
mercial exhibits and 32 schools and 10 
clubs were represented. 

Demonstrations of spinning with distafif 
and spindle and wheels, and of weaving on 
colonial, modern arid tapestry looms were 
held daily during the exhibition. 



iiaeeciatlon 

APR 23 taw 






The Story of Textiles 



Early Weaving 

When savage women first began to look 
about them for means of making their lives 
more comfortable, they plaited, twisted and 
tied limber vines and twigs and grasses — 
whatever they could find — and out of these 
made houses, furniture and clothing. Thus 
in diflferent parts of the world, savages 
made the same inventions. 

For instance, there is the round house. 
You stick several young saplings into the 




Fig. 1 . Framework of a round house. 

ground, to form a circle, or you use saplings 
growing from the ground. You tie their 
tops together, and weave in and out around 
these uprights small boughs, long grass, 
rushes, or whatever is handy and limber 
enough for your use (Fig. 1). 

Or, put on grasses like a thatch, hold 
them down by sticks across them (Fig. 2) 
and tie these sticks by twining them. Mud 




Wattling. 



and clay added to such twined work 
make a "wattle and daub" hut (Fig. 3). 
Many varieties of these houses are made 
by the American Indians and the char- 



coal burners of England make round 
huts of "a number of thin poles, laid to- 
gether in the form of a cone; — interlaced 
with brushwood, covered with sod, laid 




Fig. 3. Covered round house. 

grass side in." Matting also is woven for 
floor coverings (Fig. 4). And the roots, 
stems, bark and leaves of many plants 




Fig. 4. Matting made of sugar cane bark by Indians. 

furnish materials for baskets to hold food 
(Fig. 5, Fig. 6) for clothing, for armor, 
for furniture and for transportation (Fig. 7). 
The wealth of an Indian family was 
counted in the number and beauty of its 
baskets, and that baskets enter into religion 
is shown by the basket dances of the Hopi 
Indians. Woven traps also for catching 
animals and fish are common among 
savages. And among our unsettled Indian 
tribes water jars were woven before pottery 
was used. 

Early Spinning 
It may have been thousands of years 
after the beginning of basket weaving that 
the art of spinning was invented. In 



Newark Museum Association 



spinning, a long continuous thread is made 
by twisting a number of single strands, even 
quite short ones, together so that the end 
of each is lost in the twisting of several. 





Fig. 5. Rushes bent to make basket. 

We do not know how spinning first came 
to be practised. Strands of wool torn off 
the backs of sheep by bushes may have 
suggested to people already used to weaving 
that this material also might be woven. 
It was easy to make a long thread by draw- 
ing out and twisting the natural wool. 
Wool and flax seem to have been the 
earliest materials used in spinning. Early 



Fig. 7. Indian shoe. i 

From Report of U. S. National Museum, 1902 

spinning was probably done as in Fig. lO.j 

A bunch of fibres was held under the 

left arm. After awhile this bunch was 

wound on a stick called a distaff. A weight 





<^f 




Fig. 6. Wicker basket. 



Fig. 8. Distaff and 
spindle. 



Fig. 9. The rock. 



The Story of Textiles 



was fastened to one end of this bunch of 
fibres. The spinner drew out the strand 
to which the weight was attached, and gave 
it a twist. The weight fell slowly, and 
turned, thus drawing and at the same time 




Fig. 10. Spinning by distaff and spindle, 
twisting the strand. When it reached the 
ground, the spinner picked it up, wound 
the spun yarn on it, made it fast, and did 
the same thing again. When for the 
weight a stone with a hole in it was used 
and a stick was stuck through the hole, 
that was the invention of the spindle 
(Fig. 8). In Germany the distafif was 
called a rock, and stood upright (Fig. 9) 
while the spinner sat or stood near it, 
pulling out and twisting the yarn as she 
dropped the spindle, picking it up again 
and winding on it the spun yarn. This 
makes of spinning, not a continuous, but 
,an intermittent motion. 
\ These three motions^ — drawing, twisting 
and winding — are carried on wherever 



spinning is done, whether by savage women 
or by modern spinning machines. 

Very early in India, but in Europe about 
a hundred years before the days of Co- 
lumbus, spinners began to use a wheel. 

Carding 

As soon as spinning began, the woman 
began to prepare the little threads or 
fibres by loosening them, when they were 
wadded together, and by laying them 
straight. This led to carding (Fig. 11, 
Fig. 12). 

The first cards were the fingers, then, 
perhaps, thorns, and later, wires, set like 
teeth, in a fiat piece of wood. All through 
the history of the use of fibres, improve- 
ments in carding have been made to keep 




Fig. 11. Carding. 

pace with improvements in spinning, since 
the spinning depends on the carding. 

Improvements in Spinning 
To use the great or Jersey wheel (Fig. 13) , 
the worker held the roll of carded fibre on a 
distafT, or placed it in a pile close to the 
wheel. She fastened one end of this roll to 
the spindle. She held the unspun yarn in 
her left hand, and with a small stick struck 
the spokes of the wheel. This made the 
wheel revolve and that turned the spindle. 



Newark Museum Association 



She drew the strand away from the turning 
spindle, and thus the yarn was drawn by the 
movement of her hand and twisted by the 
turning of the spindle. Then she stopped 




Fig. 12. Two cards and a carded roll. 

the wheel, and turned it the other way, 
meanwhile holding the strand she had spun 
at right angles to the spindle. This wound 
the finished yarn on the spindle. Thus, 




Fig. 13. The Great, or Jersej-, wheel. 

when she was drawing, the spindle was 
really a spindle. Its work was to twist. 
But when the drawing was finished, the 
spindle became a spool. Its work then was 
merely to wind. This operation, also, was 
intermittent. 

By the distaff and spindle each strand 
spun was as long as from the height of 
the distaff to the ground; in using the 
Jersey wheel, the spinner stepped away 
while the drawing and twisting was going 
on, and back when she wound the yarn. 
The strand spun at each movement depended 
for its length on this backward and forward 
step. In our colonial days, a spinner at her 
wheel sometimes walked 20 miles a day. 



About 50 years after the invention of 
printing and the discovery of America, a 
German invented what is called the Saxony 
wheel (Fig. 14). In this wheel the spindle 
has two new attachments — a flyer, and a 
bobbin (Fig. 15). 

The horseshoe-shaped flyer goes around 
faster than the spool-shaped bobbin and 
serves several purposes: The turning of 
the flyer, which is more rapid than that of 
the bobbin, twists the thread, and winds it 
on the bobbin, and the worker by moving 
the thread from one of the flyer teeth to the 
other can cause the thread to be wound 
evenly along the whole length of the bobbin. 
The Saxony wheel is run by a treadle, so 
that the spinner has both hands free. 
With her left hand she pulls the wool down 
from the distaff and keeps piecing it on, and 




Fig. 14. The Saxony wheel. 

with the right she feeds the spindle with a 
continuous strand, while with her foot she 
keeps the wheel going. This makes spinning 
a continuous, instead of an intermittent 
motion, for the drawing, the twisting and 
the winding are all done at once. 

By this Saxony wheel, the machine did 
the twisting and winding, but a woman was 
necessary to do the drawing, so that the 



The Story of Textiles 



amount spun depended still on the number 
of skilled spinners at work. 

Now by the period just before the 
American Revolution, great inventions were 
made in weaving, and therefore much 
thread was needed. The problems were: 
To find a way to draw out the fibres by 
machinery; to keep a number of spindles 
going at once. 

John Wyatt, an Englishman, was the 
first to invent a method of drawing, without 
the use of fingers. He drew by the use of 
rollers. The first two rollers between which 
the strand passed, as between the rollers of 
a clothes wringer, turned slowly, but the 
two rollers ahead moved more quickly. 
So the strand was drawn out to make a 
finer strand with the fibres more parallel. 

James Hargreaves, another Englishman, 
invented a machine called a spinning jenny 
which fed a number of strands to a number 
of spindles, and worked intermittently, 
like the great wheel. 

He pulled a carriage that slid back and 
forth on a framework away from the spindles 
with one hand, thus drawing the strand, 
and he turned a wheel with the other hand, 
thus turning the spindles, and twisting the 
thread. Then he stopped his wheel, and 
as he pushed the carriage back, the spun 
yarn was wound on to the spindles. The 
hand spinners were furious and persecuted 
him for taking away their work. 

A few years after this, Richard Ark- 
wright, an English barber, invented a 
spinning machine with continuous motion, 
like that of the Saxony wheel. 

He ran several spindles, each with a 
flier, to twist the strands into threads, 
and to wind the yarn thus made on bobbins. 
He used also the drawing rollers of Wyatt. 
Arkwright was made a knight for his work. 
As his machine was heavy to run, horses 
and later water power were used. 

Then an English textile worker named 
Crompton united the ideas of Hargreave 
and Arkwright and made what was called 
a "mule," because a mule is a cross between 
a donkey and a horse. He put drawing 
rollers in place of Hargreave's spindles. 




Fig. 15. The flyer, attached to the spindle. 

with the roving, or unspun material behind 
them, and he set his spindles on his movable 
carriage. His machine was, then, inter- 
mittent. This invention of the mule was 
made in 1779. 

Improvements In Carding 
Meanwhile, carding also had improved. 
The problems of the inventors of carding 
machines were: To accomplish the work 
of the cards without hands, and at increased 
speed; to make a continuous sliver instead 
of short pieces ; to waste as little as possible ; 
to injure the fibres as little as possible. 
They did not succeed, however, in this last. 
Carding machines hurt the fibres more 
than hand cards do. 

Lewis Paul, an Englishman, discovered, 
in 1748, that revolving cyhnders, set with 
wires, would card. That is the principle of 
modern carding. For a quarter of a century 
the fibre was fed by hand to the machines. 
Then John Lees, of Manchester, invented an 
apron feed. All that time, the slivers that 
came from the carders were in short pieces. 
Arkwright fed the fibre in a wide lap to the 
carder which passed it out into a funnel, 
that contracted it into a sliver. And he 
added a stripper that removed this sliver. 
So, by the time Crompton's mule was 
invented, modern carding principles were 
in use: Continuous feed, continuous card- 
ing, continuous removal. 

The wheel and the band both have teeth, 
and they act like the two cards of the hand 
carder. A large roll of partly cleaned cotton 
placed in front of the machine is carded 
and delivered in the shape of a clean ribbon 



8 



Newark Museum Association 



into a can. Meanwhile, the poor fibre is 
carried away to be made into cheap cloth, 
and the impurities drop through into a box. 

Modern Spinning Machines 

Modern spinning frames are more com- 
plicated than the old, but the machines are 
based on the same principles. A modern 
mule gives intermittent action, and the flyer 
frame gives continuous motion, just as the 
old hand machines did. The difference is in 
multiplication of parts and rapidity of 
motion. 

Early Weaving 

Not all thread has been spun in order to 
be woven. Thread may be twisted into 
cord or rope; it may be netted, or knobbed, 
or knitted. It may be guided by needles, 
or hooks, or bobbins, to make embroidery, 
or lace, or tatting. But just as carding 
methods were improved to keep pace with 
processes of spinning, so new spinning 
methods were invented to keep up with 
the demands of the weavers. 

The first weaving was probably done with- 
out looms, but among many peoples the 
loom was early invented. The Chinese, 
the Hindoos, the Indians of America, the 
Egyptians, all invented looms of various 
sorts. For when the early people found 
that they could make strands of any length 
they so fastened one set of threads, which 



we call warp thread, as to keep them taut. 
Then they could put in the crosswise 
threads, that we call woof, or weft, or 
filling, more easily, and so make long pieces 
of firmly woven goods. 

One of the early looms consisted of two 
horizontal beams, parallel to each other, 
and some distance apart, fastened cross- 
wise between two upright sticks. From 
one of these cross beams to the other the 
warp threads were stretched. The warp 
threads were wound on the upper of these 
horizontal beams, which is therefore called 
the warp beam. The cloth as it was woven 
was wound around the lower, which is called 
the cloth beam. The worker sat in front of 
the cloth beam, which sometimes hung 
so low that he had to dig a hole for his feet. 

Another early loom consisted merely of a 
beam hung by the warp from the limb of a 
tree (Fig. 16). On this the worker wove 
from the bottom up. Penelope's loom was 
upright, but she wove from the top down. 
Some Indian looms were horizontal (Fig. 17). 

Improvements In Looms 
The European hand loom, which was 
also the loom used by the American colonists, 
was a frame with beams horizontally 
parallel, so that the warp threads were 
horizontal. The weaver sat or stood at 
one end, and drew the woven goods towards 
him as he wove (Fig. 18). 




Fig. 16. A Navajo loom. 



The Story of Textiles 




Fig. 17. Pueblo woman weaving. 



Heddles 

Weaving may be done with a needle, 
run in and out among the stationary 
threads. But soon the alternate taut 
threads of the warp were parted, every 
other thread lowered or raised, that the 
thread fastened to a needle or shuttle might 
go back and forth between them, carrying 
the weft thread. The opening through 
which the shuttle passes is called the shed. 
At first the threads were raised by the 
fingers to make this shed, then by tying 
the odd threads to one stick as long as the 
width of the loom and the even threads to 
another, and moving these sticks alternately. 
The Zuni Indians used for this a heddle. 
It consists of strings or wires, or cross 
pieces, strung across a frame just the width 
of the loom (Fig. 19). 

In the middle of each heddle string there 
is a hole or loop. Through the loops of one 
heddle all the odd warp threads may be 
passed, and through the loops of another 
heddle all the even warpthreads. 



By moving the heddles the shed is made 
and through the shed the shuttle is thrown 
(Fig. 20). 

The heddles are fastened to a harness 
above the loom by straps, controlled by 
pulleys. These pulleys are worked by the 
weaver's feet. The weaver pushes down a 
treadle, the harness pulls up a heddle, thii 
raises a set of threads, this makes the shed, 
and through the shed the shuttle is thrown. 
Then another treadle is pressed, another 
heddle raised, and another shed made. 

Reeds 

After the shuttle has been sent through 
the shed, the new cross thread must be 
pushed tight against the last one, to make 
the weave firm and even. At first this was 
done with a small piece of wood called a 
batten, and the pushing up of the weft 
thread is still called battening. Then the 
reed was invented. 

It is like a heddle with no holes. When 
the weaver has passed a thread through the 




Fig. 18. Colonial hand loom. 



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Newark Museum Association 




Fig. 19. A heddle. 




Fig. 20. Throwing the shuttle through the shed. 



shed, she draws the reed toward her and 
beats the new thread against the already 
woven cloth. 

The Draw Loom 

The early hand looms could make plain 
goods, and some simple figures, but compli- 
cated patterns demanded more heddles and 
treadles than one worker could manage. 
The Crusaders brought back, the Draw 
Loom from Damascus, the term damask 
being applied to the elaborately designed 
linen made in that city. In the Draw 
Loom, the shed was controlled by cords 
pulled by an assistant to the weaver called 
the "draw boy." Later an automatic 
attachment took the place of the draw boy. 



Shuttles 

The invention of automatic spinning in 
England gave an impetus to weaving. In 
1733 John Kay invented the fly shuttle 
(Fig. 21). He placed a box at each end to 
receive the shuttle. Each box had a driver 
which threw the shuttle through the shed. 
The box at the other end caught it. The 
weaver moved the driver by moving a 
handle, which caused the driver to give a 
sharp blow to the shuttle. This increased 
the amount woven threefold. 

It was still, however, necessary to stop 
the loom every time a new color was 
needed, in order to change the shuttle. 
John Kay's son, Robert Kay, invented the 
drop box. He placed several shuttle boxes 



The Story of Textiles 



11 



at each end, each holding a bobbin of a 
different color, and these boxes fell into 
place automatically. 

Steam Power 

By the time all these inventions in 
carding, spinning and weaving had been 
made, these industries had left their cottage 
homes, and factory work had begun, the 
hands gathering together in one place to 
tend the machines which did the work. 
So, as women had ceased to make their 
own cloth, large demands were made on 
the factories. To make the output larger, 
man power gave way to horse, mule and 
water power. 

Just at this time James Watt, a Scottish 
engineer, patented improvements on the 
steam engine which changed it from a slow- 
moving expensive steam pump used only 
to pump water from the mines. His 
inventions made it economical, and adapted 
for driving machinery of all kinds. And 



and hand looms, but by the application of 
power through mechanical contrivances, 
such as wheels, cogs, belts, pulleys, levers, 
gears, springs and chains, a few people can 
accomplish great results. One girl can now 
spin as much in a day as would take twelve 
hundred girls at the wheel. In 1830 Roberts 
invented a power loom. And today, in a 
modern loom, the cloth is wound up, the 
warp let out, empty bobbins are replaced, 
shuttles fly, and the loom stops when the 
thread breaks. Modern inventions are 
devoted only to making the loom work 
faster and more smoothly. 

The Jacquard Loom 

One of the most interesting looms is the 
Jacquard loom, invented by a French 
hat maker. 

It weaves any variety of pattern, by the 
use of perforated cards (Fig. 22). 

The warp threads pass through loops 
(Fig. 23) C, in cords, which are lifted by 
means of hooks, at E. These hooks go 




Fig. 21. The fly shuttle. 



thus great textile mills could use the labor- 
saving machines which had meanwhile 
been invented. 

In modern factories, the same principles 
are used as in the early spinning wheels 




Fig. 22. Card of Jacquard loom. 



through eyes, H, in needles, F, and the 
needles, F, are pushed to the left by springs, 
G, against the surface of cards which lie 
one by one vertically against the right side 
of the revolving cylinder, I. When a card 
comes into place, at the side of the cylinder, 
the needles are pushed against it. Every 
needle whose point goes through a hole in 
the card holds its hook over the hook lifter 
at E, so that the cord that hangs from that 
hook keeps the warp thread that passes 
through its loop at C raised. But every 
needle whose left end finds no hole, hits the 



12 



Newark Museum Association 



surface of the card instead of going through, 
and gets pushed back towards G. Then 
the hook that passes through its eye, F, 
gets pushed off of the hook Hft at E, and 
as the hft rises of course the cord attached 
to that hook does not rise. And the weight, 
D, attached at the bottom, pulls it down, 
so that the warp thread that runs through 
its loop, C, is lower than the warp thread 
that runs through the loops that rose. Thus 
the shed is made. A Jacquard loom may 
have 400 needles and the number of patterns 
that can be made on it is uncounted. 
Moreover, the cards go around in regular 



order, so that the pattern repeats itself as 
often as necessary. 

Knitting 

Not only are threads, after spinning, 
woven by machines but various other hand 
processes also have been successfully imi- 
tated by machinery. Knitting machines 
are used more and more each year. In 
knitting, the fabric is made by looping each 
line of thread into the one before it. The 
latch needle (Fig. 24) does this looping 
in many machines. Circular knitting ma- 
chines make stockings, sweaters, etc., and 




p '• ♦ I 



Fig. 23. Scheme of Jacquard loom. 



The Story of Textiles 



13 



stitches may be dropped or taken up auto- 
matically to shape them. But steaming and 
shrinking also are used for shaping. Many 
garments which pass for woven have a 
knitted background, through which soft 
yarns pass making a napped or fuzzy 
surface on one side, as in eiderdown flannel. 

The Fibres 

The materials which have been selected 
by mankind for spinning and weaving are 
from several very different sources. 

The sheep, goat, alpaca, camel, or other 
animal has growing from its outer skin 
long, slender, often curly hairs, and shorter, 
finer hairs, called wool, made of cells and 
covered with scales. These scales (Fig. 
25) cause wool fibres to cling together, and 
make possible the felting process. Thus 
hats are made by massing quantities of 
hairs, helter-skelter, in the form of a 
sheet on a big mold, wetting them, and 
shrinking them. The scales expand when 
moist, and shrinking when dry, hold together 
in the form of a stiff cloth. Woven and 
knitted goods of wool, also, are shrunken, 
so that besides the hold of their crossed 
and looped threads there may be the hold 
of scale on scale to make the cloth compact. 

Silk has no cells. It is a long smooth, 
cylindrical fibre, made by the union of two 
streams of gummy fluid that issue from 
the worm, unite, and dry (Fig. 26). Its 
length makes it easy to spin, and its length 
and smoothness make it glossy. But the 
gummy particles that adhere to it are hard 
to get off without weakening the fibres. 

Cotton fibres are one-celled hairs growing 
from the outer skin of the cotton seed. 
A cotton fibre looks like a smooth flat band 
with thickened edges (Fig. 27). It is 
twisted at intervals, and although each 
fibre is only from less than an inch to two 
inches long, this twist makes it easy to 
spin, for the fibres cling together readily, and 
are quite elastic. 

The fibres spun to make linen are the 
long bast fibres that are under the outer 
layer of bark in the flax stalk. A fibre may 
be a yard long, and is made of a number of 




=fe 



Fig. 24. Latch needle from knitting machine. 

cells. The fibre is cylindrical (Fig. 28) 
and has every now and then a hump like 
the joint of a bamboo. 

These are the chief fibres spun and woven, 
but there are others each of wl .ich has been 
used either in some part of the world where 
it is easily obtained, or as a substitute or 
adulteration of more expensive fibres in 
modern manufacture. Ramie is obtained 
from a nettle; China grass is much like it. 
They are silky, but stiff and inelastic. 
Jute is a bast fibre found in India. It is 
long, and soft, but weak. Hemp is derived 
from many plants and resembles flax. It is 
used for rope and cord. Pineapple fibre 
is taken from the leaves of the pineapple 
plant. It makes the Pina cloth of the 
Philippines. Coir is obtained from the shell 
of the cocoanut. 

By the use of the microscope, a student 
can tell what fibres have been used in 
making a cloth, in what amounts, and how 
they have been combined. 

Silk 

There are, in the silk raising countries, 
persons especially engaged in raising the 
worms. They save the best cocoons for 
their eggs. 

The female moth breaks open the cocoon 
where she has lain wrapped in silken threads 
(Fig. 29, 30) , and lays several hundred eggs 
on sheets of muslin or paper provided her 
for that purpose, and in a few days she 
dies. The sheets are placed in cold storage 
for several months. Then the eggs are 
hatched by heat. 

For about 50 days the worms are fed 
the leaves of the white mulberry tree 
(Fig. 31). The condition of the leaves 
affects the silk. Even the soil in which 
the trees are planted is important. 



14 



Newark Museum Association 





Fig. 25. Wool and hair fibres enlarged. 



Fig. 26. Silk fibre 
with gun particles. 



While eating and growing the worm 
changes its skin four times (Fig. 32) . After 
the fourth moult, the worm spins its cocoon. 
The spinning glands are full of transparent 
liquid, which theworm forces, in two delicate 
threads, from two openings underneath 
the mouth. These threads become one 
as they issue and harden as the air touches 
them (Fig. 33). In them the worm winds 
itself. As the liquid becomes exhausted 
the worm wastes away and changes to a 
chrysalis. This chrysalis, if left to itself, 
would become a moth in fifteen or twenty 
days, and eat its way through the end of 
the cocoon, thus breaking the fibres. The 
cocoon, therefore, is heated to kill the 
chrysalis within, soon after the spinning is 
finished. 

The cocoons are then sent to the reeling 
establishments. Here a reeler places several 
of them in a basin of boiling water. The 
reels are run by hand or power. The loose 
silk is removed from the outside of the co- 
coon and laid aside, with defective cocoons, 
to be used for spun silk. With a revolving 
brush the reeler catches the ends of the 
threads on several cocoons, takes them with 
his fingers and draws them from the cocoons 
until they begin to run smoothly. All 



the threads from the cocoons in one basin 
of water are now united, twisted lightly in 
the fingers, threaded through an eye of 
glass or agate, fastened to the reel and 
wound upon it in the shape of a hank or 
skein (Fig. 34). The reeled silk in skein 
form is usually shipped to countries which 
manufacture silk goods. 

The raw silk is made into yarn for 
weaving by a series of processes called 
throwing. The throwster winds the skeins 
of silk upon bobbins, piecing all bad places 
and removing all irregularities. 

The silk thus wound usually needs to be 
doubled and twisted to give it enough 
strength for boiling and dyeing. Singles 
are the original threads as reeled off from 
a basin of cocoons, and are used for special 
kinds of very fine, thin goods (Fig. 35). 
Quite strong threads are made by twisting 
together these singles, which have already 
been themselves tightly twisted. These 
threads are used chiefly for warp threads in 
weaving. vSofter crosswise threads also are 
made by uniting two or more imtwisted 
threads, with a slight twisting. 

Before weaving, the thrown silk is boiled 
to remove the gum. This process makes the 
silk lighter in weight. It is next usually 



The Story of Textiles 



15 



weighted. For this purpose the skeins are 
dipped in salts of tin or iron, of which the 
silk takes to itself a certain part. On the 
whole, weighting weakens the fibre, and the 
chemical effects which follow may destroy 
the silk or ruin its color. 

Silk is dyed in the yarn or in the piece. 
If the yarn is dyed, the skeins are then 
wound off on bobbins ready for the loom. 

Embroidery silk and sewing silk are made 
by giving special twists to varied numbers 



Cotton 

The cotton plant grows from four to six 
feet high (Fig. 36) and after blooming is 
covered with brown pods called bolls (Fig. 
37, 38), which burst open when ripe, showing 
the cotton inside. Cotton is picked by 
pulling the fibre from the boll and it is 
necessary to have this part of the process 
done by hand as judgment has to be used as 
to whether the cotton is ripe. If a bit of 




Fig. 27. Cotton fibres enlarged. 



Fig. 28. Flax fibres enlarged. 



of threads according to size required. The 
thread obtained from this process is again 
united with other threads of the same kind, 
and given the reverse twist. 

Spun silk is made from the short ends 
and waste of reeled silk and from defective 
cocoons, which do not yield the long thread. 
It is spun as are other fibres, but it has not 
the strength of reeled silk. 

There are several kinds of artificial silk. 
Most of it is made from a preparation of 
cellulose so treated as to produce thin 
threads of great lustre and beauty. Such 
silk, however, usually lacks the strength of 
real silk and some kinds go to pieces when 
wet. 



■I^HHH 


^^^^^m^^^^^^i 


^^^^1 


^^^^^H^^'^^f-^ ^^1 


IPV^H 


^^r ' m 


^^ *^i|H 


^^^^^K^ yH 




B. J 


^:..:. „ 


JHHI^^I 



Fig. 29. Moths emerging from Corticelli cocoons 
Copyright, 1911, Nonotuck SUk Co. 

unripe cotton gets into the mass it will 
neither spin nor dye properly. 



16 



Newark Museum Association 



The application of steam power to the 
loom at the end of the eighteenth century 
made it important for the weavers to get 
more raw material, and at just that time 
Kli Whitney, seeing how hampered the 
cotton growers were by the difficulties of 
removing the seed from the cotton by hand, 
invented his cotton gin. Before that, cotton 
could be cleaned at the rate of a pound a 
day for each worker. Today a saw gin 
cleans 4000 pounds a day. 

Whitney's gin consisted of a drum with 
wire teeth which rotated against a grate on 
the other side of which was the cotton. 
The teeth caught the fibre and pulled it 
through the bars leaving the seed on the 
other side. For long fibred cotton there has 
since been invented a roller gin in which the 
seeds are pushed off by two blades that 
strike the cotton as it is drawn by the rollers. 

The fluffy cotton is then pressed and 
tied into a bundle, or bale. 



Linen 

Although flax fibres are hidden in the 
stalk of a plant, and are difficult to separate, 
yet flax seems to have been woven as early 
as wool and earlier than either cotton or silk. 

Flax is a plant, about two feet high (Fig. 
39), grayish green in color. 

Just before the plant is ripe, it is pulled 
up by the roots, by hand, and dried on 
the ground. It is combed with iron combs 
to remove its seed and leaves. 

Then the stalks are steeped in water to 
loosen the outside bark and the inside pith 
from the fibres between them. These 
stalks are then broken (Fig. 40). In 
breaking machines they are passed through 
rollers and beaten with revolving wooden 
blades to get away all the woody and pithy 
particles. 

The fibre which remains is combed or 
hackled. It is drawn through iron combs. 



C 




Fig. 30. Female Corticelli moth. 
Copyright. 1911, Nonotuck Silk Co. 

At the mill, the cotton is cleaned, 
smoothed and straightened by a series of 
revolving cylinders with teeth. It is then 
carded, and run through a tube which makes 
it into a soft sliver. It is drawn and spun 
by the processes that we know. In England 
it has been the custom for men to spin the 
cotton, using mostly mules, but in America 
it is usually spun by girls at upright frames. 



hig. il. coriicelli silkworm eating. 
Copyright, 1911, Nonotuck Silk Co. 

each finer than the last, until it is fine 
enough to spin and then it is combed again 
into a long thin sliver, which is drawn out 
by machinery into a rove, fit for spinning. 
Linen is made from the flax fibres ac- 
cording to the general principles of spinning 
and weaving, but no modern loom turns 
out linen as fine as that of ancient Egypt. 
Around one Eg>'ptian mummy was wrapped 



The Story of Textiles 



17 




■ 


1 


^«m 


■ 


Ih^^'* alHffi^Sffi 


jfc5.v , 


v « " ■-«? 


^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^1 


mSki^^B^ 


,'''rj,' '■ . 


■\.,:^ 


^^^^^^^^B 


USEh vfr ' ^i" 


ir- 

i' 


*^>.9( 


■ 


■H 


1^^ 




[^H 


I^^^B^ 


't ">,,.,-. 


VWr^ 


^^^^^H 


^^^^^■K^K^ -<^^"^k\ 






^^^^^^^^^■^H 


^■I^^N i. ;- 




,';J 


I^^^H 


■l 


itt 


^1 


^1 



Fig. 32. Corticelli silkworms about 18 days old. 
Copyright, 191 1, Nonotuck Silk Co. 



Fig. 33. Completed Corticelli cocoon 

Copyright, 1911, Nonotuck Silk Co. 



cloth containing 540 warp threads to the 
inch, while the best modern English linen 
has 350. 

Wool 

When savage men instead of wearing the 
pelts of animals spun and wove their wool 
they began one of the world's great in- 
dustries. 

Wool may be pulled from the skins of 



slaughtered sheep, but it is chiefly cut, 
either by hand or machinery, from the 
living animal. It is sent, then, in bags 
to warehouses where buyers from the mills 
examine and bid for it. 

At the mill it is sorted into different 
grades, or mixed by hand to form different 
grades. The grease and dirt are washed 
away by machines. Then it is sprinkled 
with oil. 






Fig. 34. Reeling silk. 



Fig. 35. Threads made by twisting. 



li 



Newark Museum Association 



After this process the wool is treated 
differently according to whether it is to be 
made into woolen or worsted yarns. Woolen 
yarn is usually made of the shorter fibres; 
the object in its manufacture is to keep the 
fibres crossed and intermingled and bring 
as many ends to the outside of the thread as 
possible, so that after the yarn has been 
woven into goods, the intercrossed fibres 
may be felted, that is, interlocked to make 
a tight matted piece of goods. Worsted 
yarn is made usually of the longer fibres. 








Fig. 36. Cotton plait. 

which go through many combing processes 
to straighten the fibres and keep them 
even and parallel. Worsted yarn cannot 
easily be adulterated, but woolen yarn is 
frequently adulterated both in the earlier 
and later states. 




Fig. 40. Flax brake. 



Woolen 

Burrs and vegetable 
fibres are removed by a 
chemical process called 
carbonizing. An acid 
and heat are applied. 
This burns out the vege- 
table fibres, but leaves 
the wool. 



Worsted 

Burrs are removed by 
a machine consisting of 
rollers which so move 
against each other as 
to knock the burrs out. 
The wool is delivered as 
a soft sliver. 




A B 

Fig. 41. Slivers of wool and worsted 

Both woolen and worsted then are combed 
through toothed cvlinders. 





^ 



Fig. 37. Cotton boll. 



Fig. 38. Cotton boll, open. 



Fig. 39. Flax Plant. 



The Story of Textiles 



19 



Peculiar carding ma- 
chines are used consist- 
ing of toothed cylinders 
against which smaller 
cylinders work. These 
comb and open the wool 
so as to intermix the 
fibres and to bring the 
ends to the outside. 

Woolen yarn is spun 
on the mule. But, be- 
cause a fuzzy thread is 
wanted, the rollers in the 
wooden mule do no 
drawing. All the draw- 
ing is done by the reces- 
sion of the carriage. 

The most important 
processes in the making 
of woolen cloth come 
after the weaving. Then 
the polishing, felting and 
shrinking are done. 



In the slivers which 
come from these pre- 
parers are still some 
short fibres. These are 
now removed by the 
comb. They are used 
in the manufacture of 
woolen yarn. 

There are several 
systems of spinning 
worsted yarn. In all 
of them the aim is to 
get an even sliver with 
parallel fibres. There- 
fore there is in all much 
skillful drawing by 
rollers. 

Worsted goods are 
fine and smooth and 
well adapted to showing 
patterns. 



Bleaching, Dyeing and Decorative 
Weaving 
By the very nature of weaving a pattern is 
formed, which by its regularity is pleasing. 
In the simplest weave, called the plain 
weave (Fig. 42), even when warp and filling 
are of the same material, the cris-crossed 




Fig. 42. Plain weave. 

threads reflect the light dififerently, with 
restflts that are agreeable — giving the feeling 
of texture. The earliest basket weavers, 
noticing this, began to make variations of 
it. A simple variation (Fig. 43), is the 
basket weave. Another (Fig. 44), is the 



poplin weave. In this either the warp or 
the filling threads may be grouped. In 
the twilled weave, diagonal effects are 
made (Fig. 45), and in the satin weave 
(Fig. 46), either warp or weft threads are 
unbroken, for so long a space as to give an 
appearance of smoothness. 

The use of different colors makes any 
weave more effective and gives opportunity 
for the application of design. Basket 
makers in many lands soon learned this. 

They used at first grasses that when dried 
were of varied colors and then they dis- 
covered natural dyes. 

The Algonquin Indians wove into their 
hempen garments the feathers of the wild 




Fig. 43. Basket weave. 

turkey and the hairs of the moose. And 
textile printing originated independently 
in China, India, Chile and Mexico. 

In order to take well the coloring matter 
applied to them, fibres must be scoured to 
remove the gums, waxes, oils and the like 
that cling to them. And if they are to be 
given light tints, they must also first be 
bleached. 




Fig. 44. Poplin weave. 

Textiles may be made ornamental in 
color by dyeing the yarns, using different 
colors in the weave and making variations 
in the weaving process; or by dyeing the 



20 



Newark Museum Association 



woven textile in the piece; or by printing 
a colored design upon one surface of the 
cloth; or by embroidery. 






^m 



Fig. 45. Twilled weave. Fig. 46. Satin weave. 

Fig. 47 shows how the two surfaces of a 
cloth may be made of different colors, 
and Fig. 48 shows how a plush may be 
made by a double cloth process. 




Fig. 47. How double cloth is woven. 

The soft colors of oriental rugs are pro- 
duced from natural sources. In Europe and 
America, aniline dyes are used. A Persian 
dyer, having the recipe for a certain color 
as a family inheritance, will dye his skeins, 
expose them to the sun, and use them when 
of just the right tone. He tries not so 
much to match as to blend his colors. 
And his colors last — or if they fade, change 
to another tone of the same color. Aniline 
dyes, in fading, change their colors. 

In the factories of western countries, 
chemists are constantly engaged in experi- 
menting and testing. The results are 
accurate, but not individual. 

In spite of the fact that manufacturers 
are constantly copying historic ornamenta- 
tions, there are many artists employed in 
making designs for textiles, and the highest 
prices are paid, not for the amount of 
material in a piece of cloth, but for the 
beauty of its design, the fineness of the 
spinning and the skill with which it is 
woven. 



In the middle of the 19th century there 
began in England, partly as a result of the 
writings of Thomas Carlyle, who preached 
the doctrine that it is the business of the 
world to give to us all opportunity for 
originality, what was called the arts and 
crafts movement. It was a reaction against 
the sameness of machine-made goods, and 
in favor of the expression of individual 
taste. An artist and poet, William Morris, 
who made nets in his boyhood and stitched 
embroideries in his manhood, revived the 
old art of tapestry weaving and restored 
long lost methods of dyeing. Many people 
in America, also, took up the idea, and the 
houses of the rich began to be decorated 
with hand-woven tapestries made in the 
studios of craftsmen artists, while art 
rugs and art handwork are made in many 
middle class homes, and pupils in the schools 
are taught the principles of designing by 
applying them to beautiful things for use 
as clothing or house decorations. 

Economics of Textiles 

The practical values of knowing some- 
thing about textiles are several. 

A person buying textiles should suspect 
material that seems to be too good for the 
price asked for it. 

A good way to test the wearing quality 
of cloth is by pressing the thumbs together 
and then pulling the material straight out, 
first warp way and then filling way. If 
it tears or frays either way, it lacks strength. 
Double the material, and run a needle 
along as if tucking, and pull the single 
cloth on each side away from the needle 
to see whether it will bear strain at seams. 

Wool burns slowly, goes out quickly, 
leaves a gummy substance, and burns with 
a bad odor. vSilk behaves somewhat like 
wool. Cotton burns quickly and is hard 
to blow out. Linen burns somewhat like 
cotton, but less quickly. 

Linen, quickly torn, will leave straight 
smooth threads along the edge, but cotton 
will curl up. A good ear can hear the 
differences in the materials when torn. 

Raveling a sample and examining the 
threads and the weave will show much to 



The Story of Textiles 



21 




Fig. 48. Phish weave. 



the eye, and more through a magnifying 
glass. Holding a sample to the light also 
often shows imperfections of weave and 
of thread. Linen is bought by weight, 
and there is a standard number of threads 
to the inch in each sort. 

The tongue can often be used to discover 
sizing and weighting, or the finger nails can 
remove sizing. Silk, weighted with minerals, 
left in a hot oven for an hour or more, will 
be burned out, and the weighting will 
remain. 

Samples can be cut into halves, and one 
half preserved while the other is wet, sprinkled, 
exposed to damp, or to sunlight. 

Glycerin makes linen transparent, but 
not cotton. 

In washing woolen cloth, the problem 
is to felt, or shrink, the wool as little as 
possible. Wool, expanded by heat and 
then contracted by cold, felts. Alkalies 
and rubbing felt wool. Very hot water 
or too hot an iron will felt and stiffen wool. 

Color changed by acids can often be 
restored by touching the spots with an 
alkali like weak ammonia. 

Ammonia and borax, when weak, are 
harmless in the laundry. Too much wash- 
ing soda is injurious, but enough to make 
the water soft is generally safe. 

Textiles and History 

Weaving had a high place in the minds of 
the ancients. Isis was the goddess that 
looked after it in Egypt, Minerva in Greece, 



and Penelope in Rome. Queen Semiramis 
invented it for the Assyrians. And many 
American Indian tribes use baskets in 
their religious ceremonies and represent 
their sacred myths in the ornaments on 
their baskets and rugs. The Chinese 
Empress who gave her people silk more 
than 4000 years ago, was deified. 

Tales are told of ladies, in the olden 
days, so industrious that they spun as they 
rode their palfreys. But the weaver neces- 
sarily stays in one place, and thus the 
invention of weaving was one of the in- 
fluences that led to the homekeeping of 
women. Although the keeping of flocks, 
which also weaving encouraged, helped to 
make the whole tribe wander as their 
flocks sought fresh pastures. 

Textiles have influenced much the trade 
of the world. The Chinese junk crept 
southward along the coast of Asia, laden 
with silk, and returned with the cottons of 
India. Caravans crossed the desert with 
the "woven wind" of the Hindoos; Persian 
merchants brought to the western coast 
their many-colored rugs; the Crusaders, 
returning from the Holy Sepulchre, brought, 
not only the goods of the East, but the ways 
of their manufacture. 

The weaving art traveled from the East 
into Greece, Italy, Spain and Flanders, 
and later into Germany, whose men did 
their weaving in caves because they were 
ashamed to be known as practising an art 
of peace. 



22 



Newark Museum Association 



The Arabs introduced silk culture into 
Italy, where the methods of manufacture 
were kept secret for 300 years. 

The English language contains many 
reminders of spinning and weaving. When 
every woman spun, there arose the word 
"spinster" and the phrase, "on the distaff 
side," for one's mother's family, as dis- 
tinguished from the father's family, "on 
the spear side." And all the Shepards, 
Shurmans, Woolseys, Kempsters, Weavers, 
Dyers, Webbs, Fullers and Bates know 
what was the occupation of their ancestors. 

The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes 
drove spinners and weavers into England, 
and helped to lay the foundation of her 
manufacturing and commercial supremacy. 
America's rebellion against England was 
largely caused by the orders forbidding 
export of woven goods from the colonies, 
or trade between the colonies, or even 
from one part of a colony to another. 
The War of 1812 was in part the result of 
England's prohibiting the carrying of Ameri- 
can products to continental ports. The 
Civil War was largely the fruit of the belief 
that cotton was king. 

Men's ways of living have been changed 
by their ways of making cloth. In England, 
when weaving was done in cottages, there 
were the conditions described in Silas 
Marner. When one loom demanded the 
work of many spinners, workers gathered 
into villages and towns. American frontiers- 
men could conquer the plains because they 
took looms with them. The wool which 
the sons raised the mothers carded, the 
daughters spun, the wives wove. The 
invention of power looms took the workers 
from their homes into factories, and helped 
bring about the present conditions of 
separation between capital and labor. 

Children have, from the first, been 
employed in weaving and spinning. Edward 
I sent his sons to school and set his daughters 
to "wool-worke." In the late 17th century 
it was proposed to have spinning schools 
in England like those of Germany. Two 
hundred girls, from six years upward, sat 
and spun. The mistress sat in a pulpit 



and tapped any idler with a long wand. 
If the idling continued, the mistress rang 
a bell for an attendant who whipped the 
culprit. When, after Arkwright's invention, 
the operations of spinning and weaving 
were brought under one roof, children 
were found to be more skillful than adults 
in tying broken threads. Charlotte Bronte 
in "Shirley" boasts for Moore, the mill 
owner, that he never beat the children 
who worked for him. The battle to get 
children out of American mills is still being 
waged. 

Textiles and Romance 

Even the history of the fibres is full of 
interesting incidents and strange myths. 
For 1500 years after oriental silk goods were 
known in Europe it was believed that silk 
was a woolly substance spun from the 
leaves of trees. There is one story of two 
Chinese girls lured into Japan to teach the 
art of silk weaving, another of a Chinese 
princess who carried the worms to India 
in her hair. Two Persian monks imported 
silkworm eggs into Europe in hollow canes. 

The inventors of labor-saving devices 
in weaving had romantic, and usually 
tragic, careers. Kay's model was destroyed 
as a "dangerous piece of furniture," and 
he died in want. Crompton, after much 
misery, died a poor man. William Lee 
invented the knitting machine because he 
was jealous of the attention that his sweet- 
heart gave to her needles. Lee died in 
poverty; the fate of the sweetheart is not 
told in the annals of manufacture. 

To Jacquard, Napoleon said, "Are you 
the man- who can do what God cannot — 
tie a knot in a taut string?" 

John Slater, an Englishman who was 
the founder of the cotton industry in 
America, started for his employees the 
first vSunday School in the country. The 
story of Eli Whitney's invention is famous. 

Literature is full of allusions to this 
great industry\ Joseph in Egypt was 
"arrayed in fine linen;" in Leviticus the 
plague was to be reported, "either in the 
warp or in the woof." In James Lane 



The Story of Textiles 



23 



Allen's Reign of Law there is a wonderfully 
beautiful description of the cycle of the 
hemp industry; John Halifax gives an 
account of the introduction of steam-run 
machinery; Penelope's suitors were kept 
off, so that she should not "lose her threads" 
by taking unfinished goods from the loom. 
Virgil describes silk as carded from leaves. 
Early European pictures of the cotton 
plant are ornamented with sheeps' heads 
growing at the ends of branches on a tree. 
Pepys' diary has an account of a dispute in 
1663 on the question, Is calico linen? 

"Jack of Newbury" a century and a half 
earlier, had something like a factory^ — 

Within one room, being large and long. 

There stood two hundred looms full strong; 

Two hundred men, the truth is so, 

Wrought in these looms all in a row; 

By every one a pretty boy 

Sat making quills with mickle joy. 

And in another place hard by 

A hundred women merrily 

Were carding hard with joyful cheer, 

Who singing sat with voices clear. 

Then to another room came they 

Where children were in poor array, 

And every one sat picking wool. 

The finest from the coarse to cull. 

Weave the warp and weave the woof, 

The winding sheet of Edward's race, 

Give ample room, and verge enough 

The characters of Hell to trace. 

— Gray, The Bard, II, 1. 

My days are swifter than a weaver's 
shuttle. Job VII, 6. 

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, 
good and ill together. 

—Alls Well That Ends Well, Act IV, Sc. 3. 

O, what a tangled web we weave, 
When first we practice to deceive! 

— Scott, Marmion, Canto VI, St. 17. 

Consider the lilies of the field, how they 
grow, they toil not, neither do they spin. 

—Matthew VI, 28. 



Matrons and maidens sat in snow-white 

caps and kirtles 
Scarlet and blue and green, with distaffs 

spinning the golden 
Flax for the gossiping looms, whose nois}^ 

shuttles within doors 
Mingled their sounds with the whir of the 

wheels and the songs of the maidens. 

— Longfellow, Evangeline. 

"Behold the fault is not in the Achaean 
wooers but in mine own mother, for she is 
the craftiest of women. For it is now the 
third year, and the fourth is fast going by, 
since she began to deceive the minds of the 
Achaeans in their breasts. She gives hope 
to all, and makes promises to every man, 
and sends them messages, but her mind is 
set on other things. And she hath derived 
in her heart this wile besides; she set up 
in her halls a mighty web, fine of woof and 
very wide whereat she would weave, and 
anon she spake among us: 
" 'Ye princely youths, my wooers, now that 
the goodly Odysseus is dead, do ye abide 
patiently, how eager soever, to speed on 
this marriage of mine till I finish the robe. 

" 'I would not that the thread perish to 
no avail, even this shroud for the hero 
Laertes, against the day when the ruinous 
doom shall bring him low, of death that 
lays men at their length. So shall none of 
the Achaean women in the land count it 
blame in me as well might be, were he to 
lie without a winding sheet, a man that had 
gotten great possessions.' " 

"So spake she, and our high hearts 
consented thereto. So then in the day 
time, she would weave the mighty web, and 
in the night unravel the same, when she had 
let place the torches by her. Thus for the 
space of three years she hid the thing by 
craft and beguiled the minds of the Achaeans; 
but when the fourth year arrived and the 
seasons came round, then the last one of her 
women who knew all declared it, and we 
found her unravelling the splendid web. 
Thus she finished it perforce and sore 
against her will." 

— Homer's Odyssey II. 

Butcher and Lang. 



24 



Newark Museum Association 



Then, as he opened the door, he beheld the 

form of the maiden 
Seated beside her wheel, and the carded wool 

like a snow drift 
Piled at her knee, her white hands feeding 

the ravenous spindle. 
While with her foot on the treadle she guided 

the wheel in its motion. 

— Courtship of Miles Standish. 

Who can find a virtuous woman? For her 
price is far above rubies. 

She seeketh wool and flax, and worketh 
willingly with her hands. 

She layeth her hands to the spindle, and 
her hands hold the distafi". 

She maketh fine linen and selleth it; and 
delivereth girdles unto the merchant. 

—Proverbs, XXXI, 10, 13, 19, 24. 

"When war's loud shuttle shall have 



woven peace. 

—A. 



Austin in England's Darling. 



Miss Nancy's Gown 
By skillful hands this wondrous gown 

Of costliest stuff was made. 
Cocoons of France on Antwerp looms 

Wrought to embossed brocade, 
Where roses red and violets 

In blooming beauty grew, 
As if young May were there alway, 

And June and April too. 
A century since that gay time 

The merry dance was trod, 
Has passed, and Nancy long hath slept 

Beneath the churchyard sod; 
Yet on the brocade velvet gown 

The rose and violet 
Are blooming bright as on the night 

She danced the minuet. 

— Zitella Cocke. 

Fair Philomel, she but lost her tongue. 
And in a tedious sampler sewed her mind. 

— Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare. 



Oh my heart has two wild wings that ever 

would be flying! 
Oh my heart's a meadow lark that ever 

would be free! 
Well it is that I must spin until the light 

be dying; 
Well it is the little wheel must turn all day 

for me ! 

— Josephine Preston Peahody. 

There she weaves by night and day 
A magic web with colors gay. 
She has heard a whisper say, 
A curse is on her if she stay 

To look down on Camelot. 
She knows not what the curse may be, 
And so she weaveth steadily. 
And little other care hath she, 

The I^ady of Camelot. 

— Tennyson. 

O men with sisters dear! 

O men with mothers and wives! 
It is not linen you're wearing out, 

But human creatures' lives. 

— Thomas Hood. 



Verses on Samplers 
Better by far for me 
Than all the Simpsters Art 
That God's commandments be 
Embroidered on my Heart. 

When I was Young 
And in my Prime, 
Here you may see 
How I spent my time. 

Helen Price it is my name, 
And in my youth I work'd the same, 
And by my work you may plainly see, 
What care my Parents took of me. 

"Sad sewers make sad samplers." 

— Lord de Tahley. 

Spinning 
Like a blind spinner in the sun, 

I tread my days; 
I know that all the threads will run 

Appointed ways; 
I know each day will bring its task, 

And, being blind, no more I ask. 



The Story of Textiles 



25 



Sometimes the threads so rough and fast 

And tangled fly, 
I know wild storms are sweeping past, 

And fear that I 
Shall fall; but dare not try to find 

A safer place, since I am blind. 

I listen, listen, day by day 

To hear their tread 
Who bear the finished web away, 

And cut the thread, 
And bring God's message in the sun, 
"Thou poor blind spinner, work is done." 

The Weaver 
Ceaselessly the weaver, Time, 
Sitting at his mystic loom. 
Keeps his arrowy shuttle flying 
Every thread anears our dying — 
And with melancholy chime. 
Very low and sad withal, 
Sings his solemn madrigal 
As he weaves our web of doom. 

"Mortals!" thus he weaving sings, 
Bright or dark the web shall be. 
As ye will it; all the tissues. 
Blending in harmonious issues 
Or discordant colorings ; 
Time the shuttle drives; but you 
Give to every thread its hue. 
And select your destiny. 

God bestowed the shining warp. 
Fill it with as bright a woof; 
And the whole shall glow 
As if wrought by angels finely. 
To the music of the harp; 
And the blended colors be 
Like perfected harmony. 
Keeping evil things aloof. 

— Burleigh. 

The Spinner 
The spinner twisted her slender thread 
As she sat and spun: 
"The earth and the heavens are mine," 

she said, 
"And the moon and sun. 
Into my web the sunlight goes. 
And the breaths of May, 
And the crimson life of the new blown rose 
That was born to-day." 



The spinner looked at the falling sun: 

"Is it time to rest? 

My hands are weary, — my work is done, 

I have wrought my best; 

I have spun and woven with patient eyes 

And with fingers fleet. 

Lo! where the tale of a lifetime lies 

In a winding — sheet!" 

— De Vere. 

Spinning vSong 
Tinkle, twinkle, pretty spindle; let the 

white wool drift and dwindle, 
Oh! we weave a damask doublet for my 

love's coat of steel, 
Hark! the timid, turning treadle crooning 

soft, old-fashioned ditties, 
To the low, slow murmur of the brown round 

wheel. 

— J. F. O'Donnell. 

Spinster's Stint 
Six skeins and three, six skeins and three! 
Good mother, so you stinted me. 
And here they be, — ay, six and three. 
Stop busy wheel; stop noisy wheel! 
Long shadows down my chamber steal, 
And warn me to make haste and reel. 
One, two, three stars along the skies, 
Begin to wink their golden eyes, — 
I'll leave my thread all knots and ties. 

■ — Alice Cary. 

My life, which was so straight and plain. 
Has now become a tangled skein. 
Yet God still holds the thread; 
Weave as I may his Hand doth guide, 
The shuttle's course, however wide. 
The chain in woof be wed. 

And now I never lose my trust. 
Weave as I may — and weave I must — 
That God doth hold the thread. 
He guides my shuttle on its way; 
He makes complete my task each day; 
What more, then, can be said? 

— C. J. Moore. 



26 



Newark Museum Association 



Textiles in the United States and 
New Jersey 

When Columbus discovered America the 
natives gave him skeins of cotton thread, 
and he saw handkerchiefs "of fine cloth, 
worked in colors." 

The Delaware Indians inhabiting what is 
now New Jersey were basket makers and 
weavers when the country was colonized. 

The colonists sowed cotton seed at James- 
town, in 1607, and they had sheep there in 
1609. 

Many of the early settlers came from the 
rural weaving districts of England. They 
made linsey woolsey, a homespun cloth 
of mixed flax and wool, for home use, and 
in 1643 the first fulling mill, for scouring 
and pressing homespun cloth, was built in 
Massachusetts. Forty years later some 
Germans set up a knitting machine in 
Philadelphia, and 10 years later Boston had 
the first worsted mill. 

Soon there began trade between the 
colonies and the West Indies — cotton and 
rum for Indian and negro slaves — and 
colonial wool was exchanged with France 
for linen and with Spain for wine. 

The early textile mills were in the upper 
stories of stone grist mills. Improvements 
in methods were slow. A story is told of a 
cotton mill at Beverly, Massachusetts, in 
1790, run by horse power. The horses were 
driven by a boy who was afterward a 
member of Congress. When the mill went 
too fast the master would call out of the 
window, "Hold on, there!" to regulate 
the pace. 

The policy of the English government to 
discourage colonial trade and the jealousy 
of English manufacturers which led to 
preventing the export of machinery, delayed 
the progress of American textile manu- 
facture. Strange tales are told of machinery 
shipped in pieces to France, and from there 
brought to America under false labels. 
The trade restrictions, as we know, brought 
about our wars with England. 

The policy of the Americans in the matter 
of textiles was intensely patriotic. Bounties 
were given to those who raised silk worms 



or manufactured cloth. In 1753, a pro- 
cession of 300 young women marched to 
Boston Common with music, accompanied 
by a platform on which was a weaver at 
work. There they seated themselves and 
spun, while weavers, "cleanly dressed" 
in clothing of their own make, displayed 
themselves. A Manufacturing House for 
a spinning school was established later, bv 
taxing carriages and coaches, and when the 
British soldiers, in 1768, tried to take it for 
a barrack, the teacher, one John Brown, 
defied them successfully. Washington was 
inaugurated in a suit woven at Hartford 
in the first woolen mill in this country run 
by power, and the senior class at Harward, 
as early as 1768, dressed in American 
fabrics for graduation. 

Towards the end of the 18th centurv, 
Samuel Slater, already mentioned for his 
Sunday school, came over from England 
with Arkwright's loom "in his head," 
and reduced the cost of a yard of cloth 
from 50 cents to 9 cents, while his wife 
made the first cotton thread in America 
In 1813 the first mill in the world in which 
all the processes of spinning and weaving 
were carried on by power, was established 
in Waltham by Francis Cabot Lowell, who 
had visited the English mills, and was 
able, being a good mathematician, to 
apply what he there learned. 

The early mill owners employed the sons 
and daughters of their American neighbors 
as hands. An Englishman who visited the 
Lowell mill described the girls, — "All were 
clean, neat and fashionably attired with 
reticules hanging from their arms and 
calashes on their heads. The general ap- 
pearance and deportment were such that 
few British gentlemen in the middle ranks 
of life need have been ashamed of leading 
any of them to a tea party." Later, Irish 
and French Canadians were employed. 
And today many mills employ immigrants 
from Russia, Poland, Bohemia, and other 
near Eastern countries. Thus employers 
and hands have become estranged, so that 
mutual confidence and understanding have 
grown difficult. 



The Story of Textiles 



27 



New Jersey 

The proprietors of New Jersey, after its 
transfer to England, offered every induce- 
ment to trades people to settle. Scotch 
settlers early introduced the raising of 
flax and hemp in eastern Jersey. The 
Quakers who settled in the south near 
Salem began the manufacture of cloth. 
In 1607, serges, druggets, crapes, camblets 
(partly hair), plushes, and linen were made. 
In 1703 John Clarke received 20 acres 
of land for setting up a mill. 

By 1784 New Jersey had 41 fulling mills 
for household woolens, but no factories. 
The farmers resisted the mills with all their 
power. "Out upon the mills," said they, 
"and the towns where they are built, 
where there is neither pure air, the comforts 
of a well stocked kitchen, nor morality." 

Even as late as 1810 most of the textiles 
made in the state were still being woven 
in private families. 

Silk has the most interesting history of 
any textile in New Jersey. 

The provinces of Virginia, South Carolina, 
Pennsylvania and New Jersey early ofifered 
bounties for the planting of mulberry 
trees and for the production of reeled silk. 
But by 1810 only 1800 yards were made 
here. The bounties were no more successful 
in other states. In 1828 Richard Rush, 
then Secretary of the Treasury of the 
United States, made a report to Congress 
on the growth and manufacture of silk in 
other countries. This report, called the 
"Rush letter," stimulated the interest in 
silk to such an extent that an appeal was 
made to Congress to aid the industry by 
bounties. Congress did not respond, but 
a number of the states did, New Jersey 
being one of them. This state passed an 
act offering silk bounties in 1838. Fifteen 
cents a pound was to be paid for cocoons. 
200,000 mulberry trees were planted in New 
Jersey. But the scarcity of the trees 
induced speculation, the trees changed 
hands at rapidly rising prices, and finally 
in 1839 the bubble burst and the law was 
repealed in the same year. The "Mulberry 



Street," found in so many old New Jersey 
towns, is a reminder of that bubble. 

In 1791 a group of men under the inspi- 
ration and guidance of Alexander Hamilton 
established cotton mills at the Great Falls 
of the Passaic. They bought 700 acres of 
land for about $8,000, created a company, 
got great powers from the state, engaged 
L' Enfant, the man who made the plans for 
the laying out of Washington, D. C, 
to superintend the work, called their settle- 
ment Paterson, and made a fine beginning 
with a parade and ball in 1794. The 
machinery was finished in mahogany and 
all their ideas were on a magnificent scale. 
The project failed, but the manufacturing 
establishments in Paterson today prove 
that Hamilton's vision was wisely placed. 

The first silk mill in Paterson was started 
by Christopher Colt, in 1838, in Colt's 
pistol factory. John Ryle, an English 
weaver, began making dress goods there 
several years later. American supremacy in 
silk, however, dates from the admission 
into England at about the time of our 
Civil War of French silks, duty free. 
English silk weavers, who could not compete 
with the French, came to America, and 
many of them settled in Paterson. 

Progress has been rapid since then, 
partly because of the opportunities of the 
state for trade, and partly because of the 
supply of immigrant labor. 

Although great eft'orts have been made 
from time to time, by legislation, to get 
fibres cultivated in the state, there has been 
no permanent success. New Jersey's part 
in the silk craze has been mentioned. As 
late as 1880 New Jersey passed an act to 
encourage the production and treatment 
of fibres. Under this law the state offered 
five dollars a ton for jute and rose or marsh- 
mallow, six dollars a ton for hemp, seven 
dollars a ton for flax and ten dollars a 
ton for ramie or China grass. In order 
to encourage the perfecting of machines 
for removing the fibre from the stalks, 
bounties were also offered for disintegrated 
jute and ramie. $15,000 was appropriated 
for paying the bounties, but only $10,000 
was ever paid. 



28 



Newark Museum Association 



The following tables from the Census of 1810 give the condition of the textile 
industry a century ago: 





Looms 


Carding Machines 


Fulling Mills 




Counties 


No. 


Value 
in dollars 


No. 


Yards fulled 


Value 
in dollars 


Spindles 


Essex 


762 
712 
533 
140 

31 
655 
190 
192 
350 
117 
766 
144 

56 


6 

28 
19 
16 

4 
10 

7 

7 

15 

2 

7 
7 






43,000 
59,000 
21,700 
19,000 
13,500 
32,400 




9,900 


Sussex 


$37,254 

29,500 

19,950 

6,975 

12,100 


11 
4 
4 
2 
8 
5 
2 
6 
3 
3 
4 


$73,750 
27,125 
23,750 
16,875 
41,050 




Hunterdon 


22 


Burlington 


170 


Monmouth 




Morris 

Middlesex 


876 


Gloucester 


14,075 
10,500 
17,500 


2,500 






Somerset 


14,450 
16,880 




Salem 


13,500 




Bergen 




Cumberland 








880 


























Total amount 


4,648 


128 


$147,854 


52 


204,640 


$213,880 


11,848 



Counties 


Cotton manufac- 
turing establish- 
ments 


Mixed cloth 

blended, and 

unnamed 


Flaxed goods 

in families, 

etc. 


Woolen goods 

in families. 

etc. 


Yards 
made 


Value 
in dollars 


Yards 
made 


Value 
in dollars 


Yards 
made 


Value 
in dollars 


Yards 
made 


Value 
in dollars 








201,836 
78.210 
20,580 
32,196 
18,749 
14,063 


$160,000 
43,688 
10,280 
16,098 
11,705 
7,031 






43,000 
97,561 
48,477 
34,123 


$40,000 


Sussex 






169,902 
152,905 


$67,960 
61,162 


73,170 


Hunterdon 






36.357 


Burlington 






34,123 


Monmouth. 












Morris 


17,500 


$2,625 


164,240 
108,720 


54.746 
43,488 


60,830 
35.831 


45,628 


M iddlesex 


83.140 


Gloucester 






149,094 

120.048 

36,000 

29,137 


198,295 
59,819 
25,560 
14,568 


















Salem 






44,200 

139,035 

68.467 


22,100 
69.517 
31.850 


13,200 
11,739 
29,552 


9.900 


Bergen 






14.673 


Cumberland 






23,641 








19,482 


9,741 


















Total amount 


17,500 


$2,625 


719,395 


$556,785 


847,469 


$350,823 


374,313 


$360,632 





Blankets of 
Wool 


Carpeting and 
covering 


Silk manufactories 


Stockings 


Counties 


No. 


Value 
in dollars 


Yards 
made 


Value 
in dollars 


Yards 
made 


Value 
in dollars 


Pairs 


Value 
in dollars 








































278 


$1,112 


200 


$60 












1,800 


$1,800 
































































































































Cumberland 














15.837 


$11,877 




































Total amount 


278 


$1,112 


200 


$60 


1,800 


$1,800 


15.837 


$11,877 



The Story of Textiles 



29 



At the present time, New Jersey manu- 
factures silk and silk goods; woolen, worsted, 
and felted goods and wool hats; cotton goods, 
although mostly small cotton wares; fur felt 
hats; cordage and twine and jute and linen 
goods; hosiery and knit goods; carpets, rugs, 
and linoleum. In 1909 almost one-fifth 
of the wage earners in the state were 
employed in these industries. 

The progress of the textile industries in 
New Jersey during the past decade is indi- 
cated by the increase in the number of 
spindles and looms and other equipment 
reported for the four leading industries. 
The total number of producing spindles 
increased more than one-eighth. The tota 
number of looms increased by about one- 
fourth, the largest gain being in the cotton 
goods industry, although the silk and woolen 
industries both show substantial increases. 
There was a decline in the woolen branch 
of the woolen and worsted industry and a 
rapid growth in the worsted, which means 
that the state is making more of the better 
grade of woolen cloth. 

According to the census of 1910, in the 
manufacture of silk New Jersey leads the 
country, with 348 establishments which use 
among them raw silk to the value of over 
$23,000,000. Less spun silk, which is 
inferior to the reeled, and less artificial silk 
is used than in any other of the principal 
silk producing states. 

The state produces goods worth 
$43,000,000 of broad silk, more than any 
other of the states; $35,000,000 of all- 
silk materials, also more than any other 
state; $7,000,000 of mixed silk; $24,000,000 
of plain and fancy silks, and $8,000,000 of 
pattern silks made on the Jacquard loom — 
the most expensive method of weaving. 
This is nearly eight-ninths of all the Jacquard 
silk made in the United States. Ribbon 
valued at $14,000,000 is made in this state, 
which is more than is made by any other 
state. 

In the making of oil cloth and linoleum 
New Jersey also leads and she has more fur- 
felt hat establishments than any other state 
except Connecticut. 



For the manufacture of woolen, worsted, 
felted goods, and wool hats, this state is 
surpassed by the number in the New 
England states and by New York and Penn- 
sylvania. New Jersey stands fifth among 
the states in the value of the all-wool 
woven goods produced; sixth in the value 
of worsted coatings, serges, and suitings 
for men's wear, and almost equals Massa- 
chusetts, the principal wool manufacturing 
state, in the manufacture of worsted dress 
goods, probably the finest quality of wool 
dress goods made. 

In 1909 New Jersey was second in the list 
of states in the dyeing and finishing of 
textiles, and employed about one-quarter 
of the total number of wage earners em- 
ployed in that industry in the United 
States. In the manufacture of rugs and 
carpets, this state stands fourth with nine 
establishments; is twelfth in the manu- 
facture of cotton goods, and thirteenth in 
the manufacture of hosiery and knit goods. 

The output of plain and fancy cotton 
fabrics, such as twills, sateens, and duck, 
was smaller in quantity in 1909 than in 
1904, but more than twice as great in value. 
This is due largely to a decrease in the 
production of fancy fabrics, and to a very 
large increase in the production of high 
grade duck. Cotton towels, toweling, 
mosquito netting, and tapestries increased 
about 90 per cent in quantity and 168 per 
cent in value from 1904 to 1909. 



Special Notes 

The illustrations in this pamphlet, unless 
otherwise indicated, are taken from Textiles 
by Woolman and McGowan, N. Y., 1915, 
and are used with the kind permission of 
the MacMillan Co. 

Some of our readers will be glad to know 
that the Corticelli Silk Mills, Florence, Mass., 
have made a specialty of supplying at small 
expense specimens for object-lesson teaching, 
showing the culture of silk. A descriptive 
circular will be sent on request to teachers 
and others interested. 



The twelve Japanese pictures illustrating silk making are reproduced from the series of colored 
wood engravings designed by Utamaro, 1754-1840, one of the greatest of Japanese artists in this field. 
The originals are 10x15 inches. 




No. 1. Women placing silk worms' eggs on No. 2. Gathering of mulberry leaves for worms, 

sheets of paper, with mulberry leaves chopped fine. The worms moult every 9 or 10 days of the 45 days 

The eggs hatch in March. The worms are classified of their larval life, and eat ravenously between 

by quality into 1st, 2nd and 3rd grades. moultings. 





No. 3. Feeding worms with mulberry leaves No. 4. After the 3rd moulting, they require more 

after their 2nd moulting. They are placed in large food, 
trays for convenience in handling. 




No. 5. After their final moulting the worms No. 6. For spinning their cocoons, the worms are 
prepare for the spinning of their cocoons. placed on trays. At the end of three days a thick, 

firm cocoon is spun, consisting of a single continuous 
thread over 1000 feet long. 




No. 7. For purposes of breeding the moths are No. 8. Women and children admiring the moths 

allowed to develop from some of the cocoons. They after they have escaped from the cocoons, 
reach their maturity in 12 to 14 days. 




^^*n?f^''v^ 




No. 9. To kill the worms inside, the cocoons are No. 10. Sorting the thread into two classes, 

placed on a bamboo tray in boiling water. A The first is white and fine, the second darker and 

worker finds the end of the silk thread and winds heavier, 
it unbroken on a reeling machine. 





No. 11. After the thread is sorted, preparations No. 12. Women weaving silk thread into cloth, 
are made for weaving. 



'/J(h^ 



